Essays on ahmed.capital

Algorithmic Management and the Logistics of Exploitation

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“The circulation of commodities is the starting point of capital. The production of commodities, their circulation, and that more developed form of their circulation called commerce, these form the historical ground-work from which it rises.”

— Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I

In The Acceleration of Decay, I made a brief argument that I am returning to here at length. Writing about the pandemic lockdowns and the state-engineered consolidation of monopoly logistics, I noted in passing that the “essential worker” of 2020 was not in fact producing surplus value in the classical Marxist sense. The Amazon driver, the DoorDash courier, the Instacart shopper, the Uber driver, all were doing something different: circulating commodities whose value had already been extracted elsewhere. I called them an army of circulation rather than an army of production, and I moved on.

No Outside Permanent Exploitation in the Age of Surveilance Capital

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

1 Introduction: Permanent Exploitation

The nineteenth-century census counted you. The twenty-first-century algorithm becomes you. This is not a rhetorical flourish but the central analytical claim of what follows. The distinction between descriptive statistics and extractive data is not a matter of degree but of kind—a qualitative rupture that Marxist theory is uniquely positioned to diagnose, and one that most liberal critiques of “surveillance” systematically occlude.

The Acceleration of Decay

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” — Antonio Gramsci

The historical epoch spanning the onset of the COVID-19 lockdowns through the political convulsions of the 2020 and 2024 United States presidential elections represents a period of profound, accelerating structural crisis for monopoly-finance capital. To understand the political mania that grips the contemporary American superstructure, we must ruthlessly discard the sentimental, moralizing narratives of the bourgeois press. The media apparatus of the ruling class presents the past six years as a sequence of unfortunate, disconnected anomalies: a tragic biological shock, followed by an inexplicable bout of inflation, culminating in a sudden, irrational shift in the electorate’s psychology.